Not far out of Albuquerque on I-40 we hit the Laguna Pueblo Indian reservation. The casinos sprouted up almost immediately along the highway. Their names—Sky City Casino, Dancing Eagle Casino—were spelled out in bulbs atop towering poles. Their facades were loud with color and exclamations. When we stopped for gas, I noticed that the entire back wall of the mini-mart was lined with slot machines. When there weren’t casinos, there were what the billboards called “Indian villages.” These were small clusters of shops selling “authentic Indian jewelry,” shards of petrified wood, herbal remedies, and other bric-a-brac alongside racks of garish T-shirts, mesh caps, and soda. Sometimes these “villages” had model teepees set up in the parking lots, and somebody had turned a pink rock shelf above one village into a silly-looking diorama of plaster bald eagles and mountain lions, frozen in action-poses.
The Laguna reservation ended before we got to Gallup, located just outside the eastern border of Arizona and the Navajo Nation Reservation, which is the largest in the world and occupies nearly half of Arizona’s upper-right quadrant. Gallup once claimed to have more millionaires per capita than any other place in the world, although when Forbes asked for proof in 2000, city officials were at a loss. Additionally, it had been called the “Indian jewelry capital of the world” with at least one local business journal asserting that if this industry one day disappeared, the town would disappear with it. According to one local woman, Gallup had also been known as the “drug capital of the world,” though she said it has shaped up in recent years. Several decades ago, the writer Ian Frasier wrote about how Navajos from the reservation would stream into Gallup to drink, since the sale and possession of alcohol in Navajo Nation was illegal.
We stayed at the El Rancho hotel, a decorous old manor famous for lodging American movie stars in the 1940s. The hotel was only building around that implied any sort of wealth, and it shared a gloomy strip of road with gas stations, a pawn shop that doubled as a church, and several adobe motels with warped roofs offering rooms with bars on the windows for $21.99 per night. Normally, that is where we would have stayed. But we had gotten a substantial discount on El Rancho’s normal $102-per-night rate because Rachel’s cousin was a supplier for the chain jewelry stores owned by the same man, Armond Ortega, who owned the hotel. On the wall next to the check-in desk there was a writ of commendation addressed to Ortega from the state legislature praising him for restoring this “home of the movie stars.” The stars themselves admired their hotel from black-and-white photographs on the wall. They were joined by mounted deer heads. There was an upright player piano and an enormous geode near the check-in desk. Furniture, dark as the floor and walls, crowded the rest of the floor. A double staircase curling up to a ring of balcony, and the two threads of stairs framed a giant fireplace in black brick, crowned with steer horns. Replace them with moose antlers, and the hotel could have been a ski lodge.
The desk attendant recommended that we go to the public square, where a traveling Indian dance troupe had been performing powwow dances nightly. The square was actually a circle, with seats carved into the inside of the perimeter and a smaller circle of gravel in the center. I guessed that the inner gravel circle was included in the design of the courtyard with dancing in mind. It all sat in the shadow of the courthouse, a tall, ornate building, easily the nicest one around. People milled around the square—families with kids, adolescents in trendy clothes, older folks. They were mostly Indians. Some people I knew back east had some Indian blood, but never in substantial proportion to their full allocation. The percentage was usually negligible enough to be little more than an amusing bit of trivia—like being double jointed, or having a birthmark shaped like one of the great lakes. Here, the Indians outnumbered the whites, and they were full-blooded, or close to it. Their skin had a general darkness to it, although some—usually women, in the present case—were fairer than others. Their hair was black or gray, depending on age, was usually shoulder-length or longer, and sometimes drawn up in braids or pinched in a ponytail. Other than that, they looked like anyone else.
The dancers, on the other hand, were done up in full regalia: outfits decorated with feathers, colorful beads, and ankle bracelets with shells or bones that rattled in time when they stomped up and down. “We dance for those who can no longer dance,” one dancer told Ben before the exercise as he pulled on his costume, “the elders.”
To call a powwow a traditional Indian celebration is something of a misnomer, much like the word “powwow” itself. “Powwow” was originally a mispronunciation of an Algonquin word meaning a gathering of medicine men or spiritual leaders. But amid the program of Anglicization, the tribes assimilated the incorrect English version, and the term was broadened to mean any sort of gathering. According to at least one oral history, the dancing aspect of modern powwows was adopted from the Omaha Indians’ postwar celebrations, which date back centuries. The history of the modern powwow is more recent. Some trace its roots to July 4, 1881, when the Flathead Indians held one on their Montana reservation in defiance of the U.S. government’s ban on traditional dances, under the auspices that they were celebrating America’s Independence Day. Federal authorities didn’t buy it, and the celebrants were dispersed.
To help narrate what was going on, I enlisted the broad-shouldered, graying Indian man sitting to my right on the courtyard wall. He had his family with him—a smallish Indian woman with dark eyes and a serious countenance holding a baby, and several young children on her right, aged just shy of adolescence, or barely into it. I guessed that he was their grandfather, but didn’t ask. He named each each wave of dancers for me as they took their turn. The female “jingle dress” dancers pawed gently at the ground with their toes, alternating feet every two beats, the elk teeth lining their skirts clattering with each shift. A huddle of young Indians kept time with a communal drum, which they would all strike in unison while one boy wailed a melody and the rest echoed it in chorus. The time never changed. They called it the “heartbeat.” The male “fancy dancers,” adorned with extravagant headdresses, leaped and crouched and twirled the miniature whips they held in each hand. The “grass-stompers” lifted their knees high and stomped methodical patterns in the gravel. My Indian friend told me the grass-stompers were traditionally the first ones to dance, matting down the field for the other dancers. Since the gravel circle had outmoded their function, the grass-stompers no longer went first, and danced only for tradition’s sake. Older Indians participated in a war dance, crouching with their forearms cocked in front of them and swiveling their heads in anticipation of an ambush—from behind the coffee shop, perhaps, or from the shadowy portico of the courthouse. The heartbeat pulsed steadily on, but the men danced out of time.
The next day we crossed into Arizona, which was hot and dry. Unlike West Texas and New Mexico, where we had seen cool temperatures, overcast skies and a number of rain showers, Arizona had not forgotten it that it was July, and that it was a desert. Petrified Forest National Park, where stopped to hike, remembered that long ago it wasn’t. In the Triassic Period, about 250 million years ago, northeastern Arizona was a lush tropical forest. Eventually, the trees were washed away by floods and buried under volcanic ash. Minerals from the ash permeated the ones that hadn’t decomposed in the initial deluge and crystallized as quartz; thus, the contours of the original wood were preserved. But it was no longer wood. It was stone.
We stopped into the mini-mart outside the visitor’s center and bought a gallon of God Bless America-brand water for $3. Then we drove into the park, stopping first at several lookout points to behold the Painted Desert before winding into a lower basin, looking at the chalky outcroppings and gradated sand in solid heaps and taking huge swigs from the water jug. At one point we stopped to play catch with a baseball on a spongy gray plain alongside the road. The ground was fractured into webs of tiny hexagons, which sank unbroken beneath the weight of our sandals. I am almost certain we were not supposed to be out there.
Later on we hiked down a gap in the plain called Blue Mesa, walking a path that wound around giant cones of earth in the shadow of the fissure’s craggy battlements. There were pieces of petrified wood strewn everywhere, as if the valley was a landfill and the fossils garbage. The examples varied in size and color, with some tiny and yellow as a fresh-cut shard, and some the size of unquartered logs, with prismatic rings across their round ends. “God made some stuff, huh?” Ben said, quoting old John Thomas of the Mississippi cactus plantation. He picked up a small ring of petrified wood about the size and shape of a discus, with a glossy red surface blending into purple. “I really want to steal this,” he said, holding it in front of him like a looking glass. The fine was $325 and up for removing objects from the park, although tourists pilfer about a ton of petrified wood each month anyway. We stared at the disc for a moment. Then, to preclude any decision that might cost us two weeks of gas money, I took the wood and tossed it toward the dunes. It spun through the air in an arc, then hit the ground with a dusty thud and broke apart into several wedge-shaped pieces. I blinked with surprise. The wood had felt so solid in my hand. It was stunning how something that had endured so long could shatter so easily.
Since we had been in Arizona, red-and-yellow billboards had been urging us to COME SEE THE WORLD’S LARGEST INDIAN RESERVATION! Where AR-99 broke off from the interstate we finally obliged, setting our sights toward a dot on the map near the southeastern corner of Navajo Nation called Leupp. Unlike Arizona, the reservation recognizes Daylight Saving Time; we gained an hour as we crossed into it. Leupp was a small village, the same sun-scorched color as the desert. Along a road leading up to the school there were rows of identical houses, some lived-in, others boarded up. Others were imploded, with the walls curled inward and the roofs flat to ground, as if they had been stepped on. We passed a children’s center, closed for renovation, and a Mormon Church, white and new-looking and the sturdiest-looking structure around.
We saw no signs of life until we reached the gas station, where dark-skinned Indians were lined up for the pumps in their trucks with the windows down. The lot was not paved and there were no marked spots, so I drew the car to a rest near the corner, out of the way of any cars that might want to join the gas lines or leave them. The minimart was the shape of an anchovy tin and had two frightening spider-web cracks on the glass door, the centers of which had been gummed up with some sort of compound. Inside, families perused the frozen dinners and younger Indians joked and smiled with one another. We were ignored almost entirely. I grabbed a fruit-and-nut granola bar off a rack, took it to the register and, in what must have seemed like an insult to her ability to perceive the obvious, explained to the young clerk that we were from out of town. Having forfeited any fantasies I might have had of not seeming like a tourist, I asked, “Is there any place in town we could go to learn about the town or the reservation?” She said there wasn’t anywhere in town like that.
On my way out I picked up two newspapers; the Flagstaff paper, the nearest city outside the reservation, and the Navajo Nation paper. The front of the Flagstaff paper had a story about how 12 Indian bootleggers had been apprehended in an alcohol sting. The Navajo paper had a story about a debate over whether residences on the reservation should be given formal street addresses to facilitate 911 responses. Opponents argued that the point was moot since many residents did not own telephones.
Outside, I walked over to an Indian man wearing a maroon cap who was seated on a rock in the back corner of the parking lot and introduced myself. The man’s name was Ed. He was in his 40s, or looked it anyway. Ed’s face was leathery, shaded pink just above the corners of his mouth, and held an expression that most closely resembled bewilderment. I might have asked him what he was doing sitting in the corner of the gas station parking lot, but I wasn’t sure he knew himself. So instead I took a seat next to him and asked what people in Leupp do.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “I guess walk around. Sometimes play basketball down over there,” his voice trailed off at the end of the sentence, and he half-gestured with his left hand.
“What about for work?”
“Um, well, they got the store there. And some folks work over there sellin’ hay, but that’s mostly white folks.” I looked over behind the minimart at a small red barn with a hand-drawn sign. “HAY,” it said. A skinny white man in sunglasses and a cowboy hat milled around in front of the stacked bales.
I talked to Ed for a short while longer. He said he took meals at the local school for $1.50 when it was in session. He told me there was a Baptist church up the road where some white folks from out of town were having a retreat. Ed would mutter answers to my questions, but never volunteered any sentences. He didn’t seem annoyed by me. He didn’t seem anything by me. Sometimes we would sit in silence for long intervals and stare into space across each other’s eyelines. It dawned on me that he was probably sitting in the corner of the gas station lot because there was nothing else to do.
Across the street on another unpaved lot—the road running through town was thing only surface paved surface in Leupp—a medicine woman named Cimi (Pronounced “Simmy”) and her portly husband Thaddeus sat under a tent behind a folding table covered with jars of medicinal herbs. The labels spelled the herbs’ Navajo names and the ailments they were meant to address: Nabiih soothed sore throat. Ts’aahlts’aa’I helped suppress appetite. Iinii Ch’il mended dry skin. Agizee’ Azee’ eased arthritis pain. Ketloh broke fevers. Tseghanil chi’I’ stopped diarrhea. Biketlool Iitsooigii dissolved gall and kidney stones. Ne’etsah Azee cleared up acne. Hisiiyaani cured cancer, as well as asthma, skin sores, ulcers, and bronchitis.
Cimi was slender, and youthful, though the grooves running down from the corners of her mouth and eyes suggested that she was probably in her 50s.
“People around here can’t afford to go all the way into Flagstaff to get medication when they get sick,” she said. “Most of them don’t have healthcare coverage anyway, since a lot of them don’t have jobs and they can’t afford to buy it themselves. They’re supposed to get it free from the government, as part of the treaty where they gave up their lands, but they can’t get that anymore. They have some clinics—usually staffed with a few doctors from outside the reservation and medical students who come here to learn—but they’ll usually just give them some aspirin or ibuprofen and some water. It dulls the pain, so they figure something is working. But the people here, you know, they don’t know what’s going on inside their bodies.”
“Does this stuff work?” I asked, striking a more skeptical tone than I had meant to.
“It comes from the ground,” Cimi said. “Of course it works!”
I nodded sheepishly.
“Anyway, there are a lot of health problems on the reservation,” she continued. “Alcoholism, diabetes…you see all the vegetables in the store over there?” She gestured at the minimart.
I distinctly remembered my granola bar being the healthiest item on the shelves. “No,” I said.
“That’s what I mean. And you know, that’s the only place around here you can buy food. They’ve got a kitchen over there, you know like food stamps? That’s the one thing the tribe pays for, that and the children’s center. But in order to be eligible you have to prove employment, and most people here who work make jewelry or medicine and do a lot of trading.” She pointed to a case full of bracelets and rings next to the herbs on her display. “That’s the kind of stuff people give me when they don’t have cash to pay.”
“So the economy is pretty insular then. People just trading with each other?”
“Not many people can afford to commute.”
Cimi was clearly accustomed to dealing with tourists. People on the reservation bought her herbs and tobaccos, but tourists were not only guaranteed to pay in cash but also to turn the trinkets she had acquired in barter trades into cash. So far she had been speaking to us in a familiar, ambassadorial sort of way, and sure enough, Rachel bought a tin of balm. But when the subject of non-tourist whites came up, Cimi’s voice darkened.
“They’re trying to get rid of our culture,” she said. “The culture is what makes us strong. And, you know, there is a big problem with alcoholism in Navajo Nation. It’s because people are confused! The white missionaries come in with the churches and start telling us our culture is wrong, and the schools start telling us our language is wrong. Our language is what makes us happy! Speaking in our own language—it’s a source of pride, you know? But we can’t even teach our children anymore. I tried to educate my kids at home and the cops came by and told me I had to send them to the school.” She paused and looked down the dusty lot, where a group of Indian kids sat in a circle of folding chairs in front of another vendor. “The younger generations, anyone under 45, really, not many of them still practice the traditional religions. It’s dying away.”
An Indian woman, younger than Cimi, had approached the table and was perusing the tobaccos. “Are you a Christian, or a traditionalist?” Cimi asked her. Her tone was not hostile but carried enough force to startle the woman, who muttered something I could not understand. “So, more traditional? Yes, OK.” The woman purchased a small bag of herbs and scuttled away without acknowledging us.
Cimi went on. She told us about a developer who was trying to secure rights to expand a ski resort on a mountain just off the edge of the reservation that the remaining traditionalists among the Navajo consider sacred. She said some of the reservation Indians—the “warriors”—had been making regular pilgrimages to the mountain to sit and protest its development, and had faced a good deal of abuse. “The warriors have always had the duty of protecting the tribe, and that means protecting the land we pray to. So we pray to the mountain and for our warriors who protect it, and we pray for our enemies too, because, you know, they’ll have to meet their creator someday.” And she smiled. It was not a happy smile, but it was not entirely ironic, either.
It did not take long to get out Leupp and into the arid plain, where mobile homes sat immobile next to rusting propane tanks. Soon we crossed into Arizona, and the clocks returned to standard time. In the highway grass just over the border, hundreds of discarded glass bottles winked in the late afternoon sunlight.
Posted from the Sahara hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada.
